This book, which is something of an ‘oral history’ of Takarazuka’s Rose of Versailles adaptations, was published by Ascom in late 2005, and features chronological accounts from otokoyaku who had performed in the franchise from its first origins through the 2001 productions. Since the book is derived from transcriptions of interviews taking place often many decades after the fact, there may be discrepancies between accounts.

Please note that the term appearing through the text as ‘theatre-comic’ is translated from the Japanese term gekiga [劇画]. Although this term is described as applying to mainly male-oriented comics in most English-language sources, this not accurate. The definition of this word changed to also include sweeping, romantic female-oriented works with Rose of Versailles being arguably the most famous of theatre-comics. Takarazuka even published its own magazine of theatre-comics in the 1970s.

Chapters have been split in two to make them more readable without too much scrolling to reach the explanatory footnotes. Some paragraph breaks have also been added for ease of reading in English. I have also included some images printed in the book as well as sourcing many other archival images to illustrate the text.

Installments will be posted every two weeks, with some breaks if the next chapter is not complete.

(Please note some images used in this chapter are from photographs rather than scans; I hope to replace these with better quality scanned versions later.)